Category: Mobile Technologies

Introduction

In this era of rapidly changing technology, mobile devices have made their way into all spheres of an individual’s life. Their role in daily life has been increasing tremendously and they are being used for much more than the basic purpose of communication. Android has emerged into the mobile world with an intention to develop a mobile platform OS. It has a tremendous potential in developing smart phones which are aware of its owner’s location and preferences.

Developing a responsive website that works well across various browsers and devices is tough. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that browser vendors keep adding distinct behaviors to improve user experience. We recently faced an issue with the auto zoom-in feature in Safari on iOS.

1. Introduction

Apple Push Notification service (APNs), which was launched with iOS 3.0 on June 17, 2009, facilitates sending small sized information to mobile devices remotely. Such information is called a notification and can include:

Badge

Sound

Custom title text alerts

Payload

However, delivery of the messages to the intended devices is not guaranteed even though the APN server has accepted the messages. One must pay attention to the below constraints while sending a message:

1. Screen Resize

IONIC allows to adjust the screen height whenever the current view is updated, either by loading a new screen or by inducing dynamic HTML. If the screen height adjustment is not handled properly, user will perceive a long delay before they can scroll to the end of the view. It is observed that; such height adjustment can take up to 10 to 15 seconds which is bad UX. To handle this gracefully, snippet similar to the below can be used, where ‘.element’ has to be replaced with the actual Id/CSS class name of the UI element.

Our first task, in the quest of mastering the Android platform involved calling an ASP.Net based web service from an Android phone, and passing it simple contact information data – Name, Email, and Address. Once the control reaches the web service, we write that data into a CSV file.

Doing this successfully would allow us to take the core of our processing away from Java/Android into C#.

To call a web service we’ll need to access the web service across the network, for which we’ll need PERMISSIONS to access the user’s internet, WI-FI and/or Data Connection. Add the following to our AndroidManifest.xml file,